


The Christmas Mission

by Lunatic_Lullaby



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Genre: Bat Family, Christmas Fluff, Gen, Merging of Comic Eras, Pre-New 52
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2012-12-11
Packaged: 2018-12-14 20:47:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11791176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunatic_Lullaby/pseuds/Lunatic_Lullaby
Summary: Dick starts a family tradition during his first Christmas as Robin and it gets passed down over the years. So long as there are Robins, Santa's sleigh bells will be heard in Gotham on Christmas Eve.





	The Christmas Mission

**Author's Note:**

> Written and originally posted in December of 2012 for Bradygirl_12's Silver Bells Winter Holidays Challenge.

"I have an idea," Dick chirped loudly one evening in December, his high voice echoing off the Cave's walls. He held his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his feet as he stood before Bruce.

Vaguely wondering why Robin wasn't already walking on his hands to work his energy off as he normally would, Bruce raised an eyebrow expectantly, giving his junior partner his full attention.

"Well, I was thinking about us, as Batman and Robin, and how we don't just stop crimes for the people of Gotham, we give them something to hope for. Making Gotham a better place is what we're all about, really, and there are lots of ways that we can do that. Like how you have the Wayne Foundation and all those boring charity parties."

Bemused, Bruce nodded. "And did you have an idea for another way we can help?" he prompted, knowing that with Christmas coming Robin's little heart of gold would probably be working overtime. The boy always surprised him with his compassion.

Lighting up with a mega-watt smile, Dick eagerly nodded back. "I was thinking that since we're up on the rooftops all the time, we could do a special run across them on Christmas Eve." Taking his hands from behind his back, the jangling of bells echoed through the Cave as he held up two red leather straps of gold sleigh bells which Alfred had hung in the manor earlier in the day. "With these," Dick emphasized with an excited shaking of the bells.

"You've lost me, chum," Bruce admitted after a moment. "This is even worse than the idea of stitching little gold bells to the toes of your shoes for the season. Everyone would hear us coming for blocks."

"That's the point! Bruce, it's only for one night. Not like the elf shoes thing, which okay, wasn't the most tactically sound thought I could have come up with. This is just for Christmas Eve and maybe Batman and Robin can take off that night, like Alfred's been hinting we should?"

"I think he'd refuse us our cocoa if we didn't," he ruefully agreed with the hint of a smile.

"So if we're not going to be fighting crime, we're free to do this. We can go on the rooftops with bells, just for a few hours, and kids will think it's Santa's sleigh. Everyone listens for Santa, Bruce, and we can make sure they hear him."

"Why not leave it up to the real Santa Claus?" Bruce asked reasonably. He still wasn't certain that Dick truly believed in old Saint Nick but he was not going to be the one to disturb that piece of childhood innocence if it still lingered in Robin's heart.

Dick rolled his eyes at such a silly question. "Because he's too _sneaky._ Santa has magic that makes him extra quiet and no matter how hard kids listen, they hardly ever hear anything. It's one of the things that makes kids stop believing and - it's just sad when people don't believe," he lamented, visibly wilting as he looked up at Bruce with pleading eyes.

Bruce took the bells from his ward and weighed them in his hands thoughtfully. "I suppose if we're going to be carrying these with us, those belled shoes would hardly be heard at all."

Dick cheered and jumped, an explosion of energy as he chased away Bruce's last doubts for the plan with overjoyed chatter about which roofs they should hit and how _cool_ it was and _thank you_ _thank you thank you!_

~*~

By the time Robin was sixteen, Bruce was well-accustomed to his ability to decorate himself for the holidays. Their first year together there had been belled shoes, then the shoes were paired with green and red striped tights, which were warm as well as festive, and the embellishments had grown from there. He expected that by the time Robin was in college, he wouldn't be able to find his partner beneath all of the baubles and glitter. After the first year of gold tinsel, he was inured to it and no longer capable of feeling surprise.

Barbara was having a harder time of it.

"You can't seriously let him go out like this," she appealed to Batman, her voice strained from the laughter she could barely recover her breath from. "Very funny," she told Robin, "but no deal. I'm not buying this at all." She narrowed her eyes dangerously and warned, "If you called me out here on Christmas Eve just to play a silly prank, when you said it was to do something for the kids of Gotham, I'm going to rewire those antlers and give you the shock of your life."

"Babs, no, I'm serious," Dick insisted, as though the twinkling multi-colored lights strung through his reindeer antler headband could never suggest otherwise. "This is something that we do every year and I just thought you should be part of it too. It's _fun."_

She gave Bruce a reproving look, waiting for him to restore some kind of sense to the Robin who she knew to be at least a _little_ practical in nature. Fun was what Robin lived for but streaking through the night like a flying Christmas tree should have been overkill even for him.  
Batman considered the best way of telling Dick that he could have a third reindeer or an outrageous holiday costume, not both. "Robin, perhaps the lights are too much," he suggested, holding firm at Dick's betrayed look.

Rolling her eyes, Batgirl lessened the blow by accepting the bells he held for her and stealing a length of tinsel from his costume to tie around her waist. Wearing a bit of sparkle for the night certainly wouldn't be the most dangerous thing she'd ever done for the Teen Wonder.

With a little sigh Dick took off his headband and began detangling the lights from it. They were a small sacrifice to make in exchange for having all three of them working together.

~*~

Dick was trying to make the new kid smile and really expected it to work but - nothing. There had been excitement and amusement at the start, when Dick explained the tradition, but less than half an hour later Jason was half-glaring at the bells in his hand when he thought Dick wasn't looking, sour and quiet. Clearly Dick was missing something because playing Santa should _always_ be fun and awesome, no matter how much of a _Cool_ Teen Wonder you were trying to be.

"What's with the glum look, Little Wing?"

Jason shrugged. "This whole _'spread Christmas magic'_ thing is cool and all," he conceded, looking up into Dick's eyes, "it just makes me figure that I probably heard you when I was a kid."

Dick smiled brightly. "Or it could have been the real Santa. Bruce and I have actually met the guy, even if Bruce will tell you it was an imposter or hallucination or whatever, and he's a little unreliable but totally real."

Brows drawn together as he frowned, Jason shook his head. "Big Bird, if you normally hit the really bad parts of Gotham, I think you should stop."

"What?"

He huffed, frustrated. What he felt should be _obvious,_ especially to a detective, needed to be said. He really didn't want to be the one to ruin Dick's fun, not when this man had made himself his brother and was trying to make sure he had a nice Christmas for the first time in his life, but someone had to tell him. It just figured that this wasn't something _Bruce_ would clue in to.

"It isn't easy," Jason said in a firm voice, "if you're a kid who's doing without and you hear Santa's sleigh, maybe even on _your_ roof, but he never comes down the chimney or the fire escape or whatever the fuck. You wake up and there's no presents or feast or magical solution for any of the same tired problems you fell asleep with. It makes you feel pretty low, to get passed by like that," he told the snow on the roof, trying not to clench his jaw because he was fifteen, damnit, and this wasn't something he was still going to feel _anything_ over.

Dick looked as though someone had kicked his puppy. It took a moment for him to handle the idea but then he pulled Jason into an Inescapable Grayson Hug and squeezed him tight. "Little Wing," he started, then took a deep breath when he heard it come out more sadly than anything Jason would want to listen to.

Having been caught like this before, Jason rolled his eyes and hugged back, knowing it was the only way to get Dick to ease up on his hold. He rested his forehead against the ridiculous lapel of the Discowing suit and felt the rise and fall of Dick's chest as he sighed.

"Point taken. I never thought about it that way." Soft and light, he asked, "But Jay, do you think maybe it's possible you were just on the naughty list every single year?"

Jason laughed and watched the fog of his breath hit Dick's bare skin, making him wonder for the tenth time if Dick was even capable of feeling the cold. "Yeah," he admitted, "that might've been it."

~*~

Sometimes Steph questioned her sanity just a little, like when a game of rooftop tag in the middle of winter resulted in sliding on a patch of ice ten stories up and needing a rescue from Batgirl. Other times Robin, who was totally five times crazier than she could ever be, asked her to pretend to be a flying reindeer on Christmas Eve and that was when she knew that her life was on the right track. Seriously.

Cass was shaking her jingle bells with her head tilted curiously, listening to the musical chiming. Steph would place money on that shift under her cowl being a smile.

"Batman seriously tells you to do this every year?" Steph asked, skeptical and amused.

"It's a family tradition," Robin asserted. "We couldn't do it last year because of the 'quake but Nightwing took me out to do it the year before. It's something he started when he was Robin."

 _Family_ tradition. As in Batman, Robin, Batgirl and now Spoiler too. She smiled wide and gave her bells a quick, hard shake, making them clang together loudly. "Lead the way, Blitzen."

Cass turned to her, a question in her stance.

"What, you don't know the song? It's one of the names of Santa's reindeer, from Rudolph."

"He had a red nose," Cass recalled at the name, touching her own covered nose.

Steph answered in a very serious way, "And if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows." She held her solemn expression until seeing Cass' shoulders shake with a little laugh, before smiling and pulling down her own mask. This wasn't what she'd expected their special assignment to be but she was totally up for being Dasher if that's what the Mission called for.

"Hey, you guys don't hit the 'burbs, do you?" she asked slyly.

"No, why?"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Are you _sure you're sure?_ Because a couple years ago I could swear I heard you on my roof on Christmas Eve, but then I realized you would never be _so freaking noisy_ and then I heard bells."

Robin regarded her with a blank expression and gave a little shrug. "I have no idea who was on your roof, Steph, but it wasn't me."

Cass jangled her bells impatiently, looking between them.

"Yeah, okay, let's go. But they sounded exactly like these bells, you know."

"Nightwing assures me they're the same kind Santa uses."

~*~

"If we're going to do this, I insist that you remove that ridiculous thing."

"What thing?" Dick asked innocently.

"Grayson."

"Dami."

Damian took a deep breath, trying to gather up the scarce scraps of his patience.

"Don't be a Scrooge," Stephanie chided him from her spot in the shadows. She'd met them at a rendezvous point clearly knowing far more about their Mission than what Dick had filled him in on before leaving the Cave. "It's good for our health to have Christmas cheer."

"Perhaps," he dryly relented. "However it is _not_ good for Batman to be seen wearing an illuminated false nose, looking like a rejected clown." He had slightly fewer objections to the bells strapped to Dick's costume, since they had at least been painted a matte black.

"I would _never_ be rejected as a clown," Dick denied with great pride. "I've been hired as a professional clown more than once. You've seen my juggling skills."

"Pictures?" Stephanie pled.

"Ask Tim."

"Ooh, will do," she vowed with a sharp smile, bouncing on her heels in anticipation, sending her own purple bells ringing.

"What if our enemies see you doing this? Wearing a belled harness like some animal, playing dress-up when we're meant to be working. _Tt._ They're going to think it's time someone drag you into Arkham."

"Dami, this is something Bruce did all the time."

"My father would not have worn that ridiculous nose."

"Okay, this is something Bruce and _I_ did, together and maybe a little bit differently. But every year that I was Robin, he put on the bells and went out with me. This isn't just a family tradition, it's like a sacred Batman duty."

"How many more of those are you going to come up with?"

"As many as it takes to get you to put on the reindeer antlers so we can leave."

Batgirl turned away to cover her snickering, the shaking of her bells giving her laughter away.

With great dignity, Damian accepted the headband with both hands. Once Dick's blinding smile appeared, he tossed it high into the air to fall off the roof and into the street below.

"Aw," Dick mourned the gaudy thing, "that was an heirloom."

Damian raised an eyebrow. "You wore it?"

"Yeah."

 _"Drake_ wore it?"

"Uh huh." Jason had flat-out refused but once Tim saw that Dick was serious and not just teasing him, he quickly stifled his objections in order to make him happy.

Stephanie scoffed a laugh. "No way," she said in a voice that made the words sound like _please let this be true._ "When?"

"The first year I took him out," Dick remembered fondly. "His hair was gelled so hard and high that it could barely stay on."

Damian shuddered in disgust. "All the more reason to discard it." Taking the lead, the green bells strapped about his torso jangled as he walked to the edge and leapt into the night. He could at least take pleasure in landing upon Colin's roof, knowing his friend already planned to stay awake as long as he could in order to hear Santa's sleigh arrive.


End file.
